There is a well-known saying that ‘you must not hesitate to turn back if you have made a mistake in choosing the path, however long you may have traversed it’. In Sri Lanka the LTTE’s way towards “liberation” is clearly a faulty path, but unfortunately one that it has traversed far too long to turn back on.
The core error is in the goal itself; the establishment of a separate state. The armed Tamil “liberation fighters’ ” call for a separate state was based on emotion rather than on an accurate assessment of what was possible.
By the time of the Vaddukoddai Conference, the traditional moderate Tamil political movement had become, to young and militant Tamils, an unsuccessful endeavor that had failed to win the rights of the Tamil people. The militant Tamil youth, together with the traditional Tamil political leadership, chose to see this failure as the failure of peaceful agitation, rather than as a failure that lay at the heart of their own struggle for rights.
In an attempt to deflect mounting pressure from the younger generation which was becoming increasingly restless, the traditional Tamil political leadership set themselves a new target. In effect what it said was; “We will no longer try to solve our problems by placing our trust in Sinhala leaders while remaining within a Sinhala state. Instead, we will embark on a new struggle for a state of our own, Tamil Elam. And in this new nation, we will solve the problems of the Tamil people”.
This landmark decision turned out to be both imprudent and destructive. It was not made after a detailed study of possibilities and probabilities but as an emotional response to the standardisation of university entrance, which affected Tamil youth in Jaffna. Both the traditional Tamil leadership and the militant Tamil youth appear to have believed that India would assist in creating a state of Tamil Eelam in much the same way it had helped in the creation of Bangladesh.
The resolution on an independent Tamil state was adopted in 1976 by the Tamil United Liberation Front, formed by Chelvanayakam’s Federal Party, Ponnambalam’s Tamil Congress, Thondaman’s Ceylon Workers’ Congress and C. Sundaralingam. Perhaps sensing the danger contained in that declaration, Neelan Tiruchelvam’s father, M. Tiruchelvam, a senior member of the Tamil United Liberation Front and a former minister, who was in Colombo at the time, had, as documented in the book “The Broken Palmrah”, questioned Amirthalingam as to the meaning of the resolution. Amirthalingam’s reply had been that the resolution was adopted because of pressure from the youth, and that when the time came for negotiations with the government, it would be possible to arrive at a solution that made allowances for both parties.
However, matters did not proceed as the traditional Tamil leadership expected. The younger generation took the struggle for a Tamil Eelam into their hands, and the traditional leadership became irrelevant. The older Tamil leaders either died of old age or were murdered by the younger generation.
The battle for Eelam turned the movement to win the Tamils their rights into chaos and confusion. It pitted moderates against radicals, and the radicals won, simply by threatening to turn their guns on the moderates.
The detrimental consequences of setting an unrealistic target for the Tamil struggle are many: –
• An independent state of Tamil Eelam requires a territory with boundaries. Without confining itself to the North and areas inhabited by the Tamils in the East, the Tamil movement declared the two provinces of the North and East to be a Tamil homeland. By doing this, it turned other communities inhabiting those areas into inimical forces functioning against it.
• The fact that the area declared to be the homeland of the Tamil people consisted of one third of the country, and included two thirds of the seaboard, created fears among the Sinhala people that a minority of 12% was trying to occupy the greater part of the country.
• After demarcating a territory with boundaries for the state of Eelam, an armed struggle was begun to drive away the “enemy forces” from the area. There can be only one centre of command in an armed struggle, and the most powerful of the armed Tamil organizations that existed mercilessly destroyed all the other organizations that claimed to be in the fight for Tamil Eelam. That fratricidal war gave some legitimacy to the Armed Forces, which were fighting against the Eelam struggle, and which had no Tamil base.
• The groups expelled from the Eelam struggle as traitors had to join the army in order to protect their own lives. And, as the aim of the fighting was to secure a state of Eelam, other communities had to be treated as enemies. Based on the theory that the existence of other ethnicities in the selected territory was an obstacle to the achievement of the goal, maximum cruelty was practiced as a means of intimidating those communities into leaving the relevant areas.
• With the acceptance of the idea of establishing a separate state of Tamil Eelam, all attempts towards achieving language rights and resolving other Tamil issues ended, and the Tamil people themselves became disinclined to do anything other than wait for the coming of the promised state of Tamil Eelam.
If we examine the struggle for a state of Tamil Eelam over a period of nearly two and a half decades, we see that the results have been largely negative.
• Although the lives of tens of thousands of people have been sacrificed for the purpose of achieving a state of Tamil Eelam, it has not been possible to achieve separate rule beyond establishing a shadow state. During this period it has been possible to score major victories in the military sphere. It has even been possible for the Tamil movement to develop militarily to the extent of building their own armed forces, but so far the shadow state that has been established controls less than 5% of the homeland that was originally claimed.
• The greatest obstacle to the establishment of a state of Tamil Eelam has been India, not Sri Lanka.
• The Tamil people of Sri Lanka have a governing party within a shadow state of Eelam, but no opposition party.
• The shadow state of Eelam has not been attractive enough to draw in Tamil people living outside its borders, both within Sri Lanka and from the large Tamil Diaspora spread across the world.
• It has not been possible to win international recognition for the concept of a separate state of Tamil Eelam. Instead, the LTTE has been banned not only in India but also in the United States and in the countries of the European Union.
• The majority of the Tamil population which lived in the North and the East, today live in foreign countries and in areas outside the North and East. Those who remain behind in rebel controlled areas are mostly extremely poor people who do not have the means to leave.
• The struggle waged over a period of nearly twenty five years has brought the Tamil people no tangible results, apart from destruction, destitution and poverty.
• Great injustice has been done to the Tamil people by the Sinhala people. However, the faults inherent in the Tamil struggle for Eelam have prevented the Sinhala people from recognizing their own wrongs.
The Tamil struggle for a state of Eelam has been a futile one. There is no possibility of achieving a separate Tamil state, and there is no possibility of finding a political solution based on that aim. The true tragedy lies in the fact that the enormous sacrifice of human life in the struggle towards achieving a goal that is not viable precludes the possibility of that goal being changed at this point of time, however impractical the objective may be.
Success is not possible for any movement which lacks the necessary honesty and courage to turn back if it has taken a wrong path, however far it may have gone along that path, and whatever the price it may have paid to do so.
A change which would bring beneficial results to the Tamil people can be effected only if the “leadership” of the Tamil struggle is able to show a profound change in attitude that would win the trust of the Sinhalese and Muslims of this country, as well as that of the international community. For such a profound change to occur, the aim of a separate state, as well as the path of armed struggle adopted to achieve it, will have to be abandoned. This conflict may be settled to the credit of the two parties concerned by reaching an agreement similar to the one reached by the Aceh guerillas with the government of Indonesia through the intervention of Finland and the European Union. All sides will have to compromise for that to happen. At the end of the day, no one is going to get everything they want.
A movement which has pursued an impractical objective will find it difficult to be satisfied with less than it expects. But it will be wiser to be pleased with the achievement of a limited aim than to relentlessly tilt at improbable windmills.